“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.”
— A. J.
Liebling, as recalled by a colleague in 1964
I first encountered this quote during one of the worst writing weeks of my life. A deadline had collapsed on me like a poorly stacked shelf — three pieces due, one editor furious, and my confidence somewhere near the floor. A friend who worked in magazine journalism sent me a text with no explanation, no commentary, just the quote sitting there on my screen. I read it twice. Then I laughed out loud in an empty room, which felt like the first honest thing I’d done all week. Something about its structure — that elegant little loop — made the pressure feel smaller, almost absurd. It reminded me that writing has always been a negotiation between speed and quality, and that the best writers have always known it. That quote, it turned out, had a history as layered and fascinating as the man who almost certainly coined it.
The Quote Itself and Why It Works
Before diving into origins, it’s worth pausing on the mechanics. This sentence does something genuinely clever. It uses a rhetorical device called antimetabole — a technique where the writer repeats a clause but reverses the key terms. The structure creates a kind of logical hall of mirrors. You follow the first clause, nod along, then the second clause flips the terms — and suddenly you realize the speaker has claimed two separate crowns at once. Additionally, the quote manages to be boastful and humble simultaneously. It doesn’t claim to be the absolute best or the absolute fastest. Instead, it stakes out a very specific middle ground — and defends it with almost mathematical precision. That combination of ego and self-awareness is part of what makes it so memorable.
The Man Behind the Words: A. J. Liebling
Abbott Joseph Liebling was born in New York City in 1904 and spent most of his adult life as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He covered boxing, food, war correspondence, and press criticism with equal appetite and gusto. His writing combined scholarly depth with street-level energy — a rare combination that few journalists have matched before or since. Liebling was, by all accounts, a prodigious producer. He filed copy at a pace that astonished colleagues, yet the quality rarely slipped. Furthermore, he wrote entire books about subjects most writers would have treated as single articles. His range was extraordinary, and his output was staggering.
He was also famously self-aware about his own excesses and contradictions. Friends remembered him as someone who could assess his own talents with almost clinical detachment — stepping outside himself to evaluate “Joe Liebling” the way a sports scout evaluates a prospect. That quality makes the quote feel entirely authentic. It doesn’t sound like bragging. It sounds like a man doing an honest inventory.
The Earliest Documented Appearance
The earliest confirmed printed appearance of this quote traces back to January 1964. A colleague of Liebling’s shared the line in a tribute context, framing it as something Liebling had said about himself. The framing is important. The source didn’t present it as a famous saying or a polished epigram. Instead, the colleague described it as Liebling simply trying to locate himself honestly — standing outside himself, looking back, and summing up his own position with unusual clarity. That framing gives the quote a conversational, almost accidental quality. It didn’t feel like a crafted line. It felt like something Liebling said once, probably at a table somewhere, and people remembered it because it was so precisely true.
Liebling himself died in December 1963 — just weeks before that first printed appearance. So the quote entered the public record as a posthumous gift, a final summary from a man who had spent his life summarizing other people.
An Unexpected Precursor from 1811
Here’s where the history gets genuinely surprising. A similar boast — not identical, but structurally related — appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1811. The verse read, in part: “Who than I can write faster, or better in rhime?” It was comic verse, not serious prose, and the speaker was clearly meant to be a buffoon. However, the underlying logic — claiming simultaneous superiority in speed and quality — is strikingly similar to Liebling’s formulation. This doesn’t mean Liebling borrowed from an obscure 1811 poem. More likely, the idea itself is simply irresistible to any writer who has wrestled with the speed-versus-quality dilemma. The joke writes itself, eventually, for anyone who thinks hard enough about the problem.
This kind of parallel evolution happens frequently in language history. Two people, separated by 150 years, arrive at the same rhetorical solution because the underlying tension — fast versus good — is universal and timeless.
How the Quote Spread Through Journalism
After that 1964 appearance, the quote moved steadily through the journalism world. In 1969, sports columnist Shirley Povich published a memoir that praised the typing speed of his colleague Bob Considine. Povich used half of Liebling’s formulation to make his point — specifically the half about writing better than anyone who writes faster. That partial quotation is interesting. It shows how the quote was already functioning as a kind of modular unit, with journalists reaching for whichever half suited their argument.
Also in January 1969, a columnist at The Des Moines Register printed the full quote with both clauses intact, calling it a “nifty quote” and suggesting it would serve well as an epitaph. That framing — the quote as epitaph — is telling. By 1969, just six years after Liebling’s death, journalists were already treating the line as a definitive summary of his career and character.
The Quote Enters Literary Biography
By 1975, the quote had reached Esquire magazine, where an editor used it to welcome a new writer named Alexander Cockburn to the staff. The editor framed Cockburn as someone who could legitimately wear Liebling’s mantle — a high compliment in serious journalism circles. This usage marks an important shift. The quote had moved from tribute to benchmark. People weren’t just remembering what Liebling said. They were using his words as a standard against which to measure other writers.
Then, in 1980, two significant things happened almost simultaneously. Raymond Sokolov published a full biography of Liebling titled Wayward Reporter, which included the quote in its opening pages. Around the same time, legendary sportswriter Red Smith published a tribute piece in The New York Times titled “Joe Liebling Remembered.” Smith’s version of the quote placed the speed clause first — matching what most people now consider the standard ordering. Together, these two publications cemented the quote’s place in American journalism history.
The Variations Problem
One fascinating complication runs through the entire history of this quote: the word order keeps shifting. Sometimes the quality clause comes first. Sometimes the speed clause leads. Sometimes the phrasing changes slightly — “anybody” instead of “anyone,” “who writes faster” instead of “who can write faster.” These variations are actually a strong signal of authenticity. Quotes that circulate primarily through conversation tend to drift. The core meaning stays stable while the exact wording wanders. A fabricated quote, by contrast, tends to appear in a single fixed form because someone invented it whole.
The drift here suggests Liebling really did say something like this — probably more than once, probably in slightly different forms — and different listeners remembered different versions. That’s how real speech works. Additionally, the fact that every version preserves the antimetabole structure suggests the rhetorical form was the memorable part, not any specific word choice.
Why Journalists Loved It So Much
This quote resonated so powerfully within journalism for reasons that go beyond cleverness. Journalism has always lived inside the tension between speed and quality. Daily deadline culture demands fast copy. Readers and editors demand good copy. Most journalists spend their careers negotiating that gap, never fully satisfying either demand. Liebling’s quote names that tension directly — and then claims, with cheerful audacity, to have solved it.
Moreover, the quote positions the speaker not as superhuman but as strategically placed. Liebling didn’t claim to be the best writer alive. He didn’t claim to be the fastest typist in the room. Instead, he claimed a specific competitive niche — fast enough to beat the quality writers, good enough to beat the fast ones. That’s a claim almost any serious working journalist could aspire to. It’s ambitious without being delusional. Therefore, it functions as both a boast and an invitation — a standard worth chasing.
Liebling’s Broader Philosophy on Writing
This quote didn’t exist in isolation. Liebling wrote extensively about the craft and business of journalism, particularly in his press criticism column for The New Yorker. He believed strongly that the American press suffered from concentration of ownership and homogenization of voice. He valued individual style, aggressive reporting, and genuine curiosity above all else. His boast about speed and quality fits perfectly within that worldview. For Liebling, writing fast and writing well weren’t opposites — they were both symptoms of genuine engagement with the work. A writer who cared deeply wrote quickly because the ideas were urgent. A writer who thought carefully wrote well because the ideas deserved precision.
His own career demonstrated the principle. He produced enormous quantities of work across wildly different subjects without ever seeming to coast or phone it in. That combination of volume and quality is exactly what the quote describes — and exactly what made it so easy for colleagues to accept as authentic.
Modern Usage and Legacy
Today, this quote circulates widely across writing communities, journalism schools, and social media. Source Writers share it as a badge of professional identity — a way of acknowledging the speed-quality tension while claiming to have found a workable position within it. Content creators, bloggers, and copywriters have adopted it with particular enthusiasm, since their work demands exactly the combination Liebling described.
However, the quote sometimes travels without attribution, or with incorrect attribution to other writers. Source Red Smith has occasionally received credit. So has H. L. Mencken, another prolific journalist of an earlier era. These misattributions are understandable — the quote sounds like something either man might have said. But the evidence points clearly to Liebling, and the 1964 citation from a personal colleague carries significant weight.
The quote has also inspired a small industry of imitations and variations. Writers have applied the same antimetabole structure to editing, coding, cooking, and dozens of other fields. That adaptability is the mark of a genuinely great formulation — one that captures something true enough to translate across contexts.
What the Quote Actually Teaches
Strip away the wit and the history, and this quote delivers a serious lesson. It argues that speed and quality exist on a spectrum, not in opposition. Furthermore, it suggests that a writer’s true position on that spectrum is worth knowing precisely — not as an excuse, but as a foundation. Knowing what you’re genuinely good at, and what trade-offs you’re making, is the beginning of professional self-awareness. Liebling knew he wasn’t Flaubert, agonizing over every syllable. He also knew he wasn’t a wire-service hack, churning out colorless copy by the yard. He occupied a specific, defensible position — and he named it with perfect clarity.
That kind of honest self-assessment is rarer than it sounds. Most writers either overstate their quality or apologize for their speed. Liebling did neither. He simply described the deal he had made with his own talent, and he described it so well that people are still quoting him sixty years later.
In the end, this Source quote endures because it tells the truth — about Liebling, about journalism, and about the ancient, unresolved argument between getting it done and getting it right. The best writers don’t escape that tension. They learn to live inside it, productively and honestly — exactly the way A. J. Liebling did, one fast, careful sentence at a time.